Feral hogs are wild hogs that are descended from domestic pigs that escaped or were released from captivity and have become a very successful invasive species, particularly in the Southern and Southeastern United States. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department reports that it is estimated that more than 1.5 million feral hogs live in Texas alone at the time of filing of this application. Feral hogs are a destructive nuisance animal that competes with game and domestic livestock for food, destroys and damages crop plants and pasture and can also destroy fencing and other structures.
While many ranchers and land owners attempt to control hog populations through trapping and hunting of hogs, experience has shown that hogs quickly adapt and learn to avoid traps and hunters. While hogs have poor eyesight, they have well developed senses of smell and hearing and are extremely fast movers, making control methods difficult. Experience has also shown that when a hog population is hunted during daylight hours, those hogs quickly become nocturnal feeders, hiding during daylight.
Because of these behavior patterns, many hunters hunt hogs exclusively or primarily at night, most often around electric feeders that periodically throw corn or bait on the ground, or that can be controlled to throw feed on command. Various devices have been developed to aid hunters in night hunting of hogs, many of which are designed to illuminate the area around a feeder so the hogs can be seen at night. Light sources that illuminate the area around a feeder, or an area that contains one or more animals that are being hunted are sometimes referred to herein as “area lighting” unless the context of a particular use of the term is contradictive to that definition. Some products that have been tried are motion sensor lights that mount on a feeder and illuminate the ground around a feeder when motion is detected. This arrangement has drawbacks in that the animals are necessarily located between the light and the hunter which makes it difficult to see the hogs, particularly through a rifle scope at night. Another product is marketed under the name “Hoginator” and purports to solve this problem by providing a battery powered motion sensor light that mounts on a pole and points toward the feeder, thus providing better illumination and no “blinding” of the hunter by looking into the light. The Hoginator, however, can fail in a real world hunting environment, since when hogs converge on a feed area they are likely to destroy anything at ground level that comes between them and available feed.
Additionally, field studies of area lighting products have proven that the permanent night lighting of an area over an extended period of time (regardless of color of light) has an adverse effect on the game feeding at the lighted feeder. Deer, as well as larger hogs tend to avoid a lighted area if other feed sources are available. It is, therefore, counterproductive to a hunting property to employ a hog control method that negatively impacts conventional deer or exotic game hunts in an affected area.
In summary, there are inherent difficulties in attempting to adequately light a hunting area, thereby allowing a hunter to hunt from conventional hunting locations (existing hunting blinds) at night. The available products simply do not provide adequate light to take effective shots outside of a 30-50 yard range, as rifle mounted scopes cannot gather the needed light from an area light source in excess of 100 yards away and the keen senses of feral hogs make it necessary to hunt from a distance beyond the range of area lighting. There is a need, therefore for a stealth system of hunting feral hogs, including from a distance of at least 100 yards without relying on area lighting.